The Net Delusion - Evgeny Morozov [103]
To even begin answering that question, we may need to reconsider the lessons of the Danish fountain. Both interpretations of the Stork Fountain experiment—the one slamming it as an oddity and the one worshiping it as a powerful example of the power of the Internet to mobilize—suffer from several analytical deficiencies. Neither offers a good account of what membership in such networked causes does to the members themselves. Surely most of them are not just mindless activist robots, pressing whatever buttons required of them by their online overlords, without ever grappling with the meaning of what it is they are doing and trying to figure out how their participation in such communities might affect their views on the meaning of democracy and the importance of dissent. Nor do these two competing interpretations indicate what kind of effect such online campaigns may have on the effectiveness and popularity of other offline and individual activist efforts. While it’s tempting to forget this in an era of social networking, the fight for democracy and human rights is fought offline as well, by decades-old NGOs and even by some brave lonely warriors unaffiliated with any organizations. Before policymakers embrace digital activism as an effective way of pushing against authoritarian governments, they are well-advised to fully investigate its impact both on its practitioners and on the overall tempo of democratization.
Poking Kierkegaard
Ironically, to get a more critical view on the meaning of the Colding-Jorgensen’s Copenhagen experiment, we need to turn to another Dane: Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855). Considered the father of existentialism, he lived in interesting times not entirely unlike our own. In the first part of the nineteenth century, the social and political consequences of both the Industrial Revolution and the age of Enlightenment were beginning to manifest themselves in full force. The European “public sphere” expanded at unprecedented rates; newspapers, magazines, and coffee houses rapidly emerged as influential cultural institutions that gave rise to a broad and vocal public opinion.
But whereas the majority of contemporary philosophers and commentators lauded this great leveling as a sign of democratization, Kierkegaard thought that it might result in a decline of social cohesion, a feast of endless and disinterested reflection, and a triumph of infinite but shallow intellectual curiosity that might prevent deep, meaningful, and spiritual engagement with a particular issue. “Not a single one of those who belong to the public has an essential engagement in anything,” Kierkegaard bitterly observed in his journal. All of a sudden, people were getting interested in everything and nothing at the same time; all subjects, no matter how ridiculous or sublime, were getting equalized in such a way that nothing mattered enough to want to die for. The world was getting flat, and Kierkegaard hated it. As far as he was concerned, all the chatter produced in coffee houses only led to the “abolition of the passionate distinction between remaining silent and speaking.” And silence for Kierkegaard was important, for “only the person who is essentially capable of remaining silent is capable of speaking essentially.”
For Kierkegaard, the problem with the growing chatter—epitomized by the “absolutely demoralizing existence of the